The case for reforming airport-slot allocation

GULLIVER is back from the 141st Slot Conference in Madrid, a meeting of airlines and airport co-ordinators run by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), an airline lobby group. In this week’s issue, he opened the lid on how landing and tak...

Instead of letting airports decide who would use their runways and when, the system was designed to have schedules hammered out by committees of airlines. In the 1960s, as growing traffic started to fill up some airports, the committees became a way of parcelling out the most prized slots.

Since the 1970s, allocation has been steered in most countries by IATA’s “Worldwide Slot...Continue reading